Typical of most of our sessions, some of my team members were already screaming at each other over an idea. The brief at hand was knotty, and have fueled some funny tantrums. In the middle of cracking the brief, two members started bickering over who takes the last beer and who regulates the temperature in the room by holding on to the AC remote.

I won’t deny that I relish these moments for sheer entertainment although it leaves me with the dirty job of calling everyone to focus.

The brief is from a new e-commerce website. As in our process, we re-briefed ourselves on what this client should really be doing, despite its stated objective in the briefing document: to increase patronage and sales.

Re-briefing ourselves has been a major intervention because I’ve gathered that most clients assume they know their advertising challenges. The best of them are flexible to trust brilliant professionals (a.k.a Kwirkly;)) with these challenges, and are open to suggestions even if they differ from their assumptions.

And so, we figured there really should be some work in creating awareness about the brand that will prepare the ground for efforts at ensuring sales and patronage.

We got to work and were ready in a few days. But for reasons best known to the client, there were delays about our presentation. Weeks gone by and the team kept hoping for the presentation to happen. My restlessness was hitting a record high.

While waiting, we hit another idea. This was going to be a major incursion. One of the competitors - the biggest in the market, was marking its first anniversary, and we proposed to hijack this celebration in a cheeky way in order to help increase awareness for the Buyam brand.

Hence, this:

We proposed it to be published on billboards across Lagos and as web banners. We sent the image to them and, whoop, we got an immediate response from them about how excited they were about the idea and, interestingly and rather urgently, for us to come make our presentation. Really?

I did a final crossing of ts and rehearsed a Don Draper in front of my mirror before going to present.

Long story short… the client declined publishing the work, despite being impressed. All efforts to make them won’t hold any water. The celebration cooled off and it was too late to publish it.

But it marked the beginning of working on the Buyam brand. It’s been part of the in-house legend about how we used an unsolicited idea to call out a client. We were ready to make that small business famous among giants. That’s the Kwirkly ethos.

Proud moment for me and the team.

Problem though: I hope the team won’t use requests for more beers as excuse to do interesting works.